Milk

I grew up drinking three or more glasses of milk every day. Sometimes I'd stir in the Hershey's, but most often I would drink it plain. As I grew older and moved out of the Dairy State I realized that milk-drinkers were few and far between. It was actually one of the first things I noticed when I moved to Bryn Mawr, because eating in the dining halls provides an eerily public display of what we eat and who we are. My dad described me once as a milkfed Midwesterner, and I definitely realized what that identity meant at college. Coming to school I realized more and more about the realities of the place I grew up - it was not the warm, welcoming place that I was raised to believe but rather a tense, sweep-it-under-the-rug kind of social scene. Something that seems so pure and pleasant on the surface, but really has a much more complex and unappealing composition and nature - somewhat like milk. As I began to abandon certain points of pride that I had about my home state, I drank less and less milk while at school. I was losing my taste for it and didn't want to keep my Midwestern roots as a part of my present self. 

As I've grown, I have come to terms with the place I come from, and I still drink milk for dinner back home.